Lecture Hall Perils!

I’m picturing the scene and it makes me think of Dumbledore calling for silence in the great hall.

That is what my younger brother said when I told him how loud my lecture hall gets before the lecturer begins.

No mate, lecture halls are certainly not anywhere near as grand as those in Harry Potter, well except perhaps the ones in Oxford Colleges of course but they certainly do not have anyone as grand as dear old Dumbledore to lead them.

Let me instead inform you about the lecture hall. Firstly, it is still a moderately imposing room simply because it can fit around three hundred people so that’s three hundred pairs of eyes staring at you if your phone goes off or you forget to mute your laptop. That is a fear everyone has I guess but it is worse when you arrive late to a lecture and have to walk the slow ascension of shame up the stairs to the upper gallery. Well that is how I imagined it would be if I was to come late but to my surprise, on the occasions that I have done so, there was no such reaction from the students sitting bored in their seats! I was even more shocked to see people waltzing in with fifteen minutes of the lecture left! Another sign of your independence when you are at university I guess.

Another aspect of the lecture hall is the bar of light which has been placed oh so intelligently right in front of our faces. I am not sure if they actually sat down to think about their design before installing the lights because whilst the rest of the hall is great, it is let down a great deal by these things:

Sitting at the top row means you cannot even see the lecturer’s head unless you lean forward which brings me to another issue. The microphone! You would have thought that with lectures being held in the hall every hour of every day, they would have done their utmost to perfect the system but nope! Crackling speakers, weak microphones or problems with the computer means many lectures begin with the ritual of ‘can you hear me up there?’

Thus have I given a taste of my lecture hall.

Until Next Time

A Worried Student

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2 thoughts on “Lecture Hall Perils!”

And “can you hear me up the back” is usually followed by the lecturer faffing around with the sound system, because despite using the same system for the last 5 years they still don’t know how to turn up the volume…